Local

The Frank Sinatra music had subsided and the two dozen or so elderly men and women stood in the wide room, talking and joking with each other. Until...

Come on shake your body, baby do that conga! I know you can't control yourself any longer!

Toes started to tap. Hips slowly swayed. As the infectious beat and rapid-fire singing of Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine echoed through the Waterbury Senior Center, the conversations stopped and the boogie began.

The program was called Dance for the Love of It, and even on this snowy Friday, the room was packed.

"We were nervous at first, because a lot of them don't want to move," Danessa Marshall, the center's program coordinator, said. "But music definitely brings out different personalities and laughs."

When the city opened its first senior center in 2012, director Alexis Rotella said, it was the first time in its history the word "senior" appeared in the municipal budget.

A decade in the planning, the center stands on the site of the old Mattatuck Manufacturing plant on East Main Street. A brownfield site, it was cleaned up, then reconstructed to her specifications, Rotella said.

Rotella, a former nurse who also acts as municipal agent for the elderly for the city's Bringing Resources to Action to Serve Seniors (BRASS) office, said when she was tapped to oversee the center, she wanted to pattern it after the expansive and service-rich facilities of Florida.

"I didn't want this to look like an institution," she said. "I wanted it to be like home."

That meant a billiards and poker room she had to fight for, because some decision-makers didn't think it was appropriate; a room devoted to a computerized bowling game, and another just for playing mahjong. Even a branch of the Silas Bronson Library.

That meant also that everything had to be free. Hundreds of seniors attend each week, taking part in exercise, dance and crafting classes, computer training in a room filled with dozens of machines, and exams like blood sugar testing in what Rotella said may be the only medical room in any municipal senior center in the state.

HAPPY TO PARTICIPATE on Friday was 72-year-old Joyce Thibodeau, a retired visiting nurse who said she used to recommend senior centers to her patients, while always dreading the prospect of going to one herself someday.

But after spending years caring for a companion who later died from cancer, she said, she needed a place to go.

"Honest to God, I never thought I would like to come to a center," she said. "What would I have done without it? It's kept my sanity."

And for 74-year-old Cindy Solomita, it has saved on the pocketbook, too.

"I'd probably be shopping every day," she said, adding that her husband walks at the mall for exercise.

"I don't have to shop, because here there's so many activities, I'm too tired to shop," she said.

And for 88-year-old Anne Swift, who was among the dozens dancing to the conga song, attending the center has kept her young at heart.

"They're wonderful; they make us do things we never thought we could do at this age," she said, referring to the leaders of the exercise classes that are her favorites. "It's so much fun to come down here, we come down here every day."

Swift also has as good a handle on the Microsoft Wii video game system — at least its bowling game — as many teenagers. The seniors use the game system to compete with leagues at other senior centers.

THE CENTER'S ANNUAL BUDGET of about $312,000, Rotella said, pays for all those programs plus quilting classes, self-defense courses, movie nights, reflexology and Reiki sessions, and other features.

A state-of-the-art computer system keeps track of each participant in each program, she said, and she uses that data to seek grants and other funding. The center just received a $10,000 fitness grant, she said.

Rotella has lost some funding battles — she was denied the opportunity to be a Meals and Wheels site and on Friday a grant ran out that paid for the facility's only janitor — but she said she hasn't given up hope on those and other possibilities.

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